I left Istanbul in mid-June to join a 10-week program in Silicon Valley to solve global grand challenges through technology. On the first day, futurist and director of engineering at Google, Ray Kurzweil, and futurist and CEO of X Prize foundation, Peter Diamandis, laid out our mission at Singularity University: create a positive impact on a billion people in a decade and create disruptive innovation.

The first thing that came to my mind were the demonstrations and police crackdowns I had just left behind in Turkey, and whether there was a way to disrupt this failed system of governance. […]